Teri and Jamie joined the throng of other deflated commuters who had decided that battling against British Rail’s best efforts to prevent them from getting home was something that couldn’t be faced without a seriously topped-up alcohol reservoir. Sitting for two hours in a stone-cold carriage on a red signal while intercity trains whistled past you wasn’t something that was easy to endure while still entirely stone-cold sober.
‘What would you like?’ Jamie was already taking his wallet from his coat. ‘A glass of Chardonnay, please.’ Teri really wanted a Beck’s beer, but that seemed so unsophisticated. Chardonnay was so much more of a timeless classic—she didn’t like it much, but nevertheless it was a timeless classic.
‘Grab some seats,’ he shouted over the noise as he pushed his way to the bar.
A table was just being vacated by two exceedingly blowsy women wearing particularly see-through blouses and ridiculously short skirts. As they pulled on their jackets and tottered out of the bar in totally unsuitable high-heeled shoes, giggling and patting overtly at their straw-blonde hair, probably wigs, no one else in the bar gave them a second glance. In the once-quaint market town of Leighton Buzzard they would have stuck out like Bill Gates in a benefit line, yet thirty-five minutes down the line in the great metropolis they were just two more weird-looking people having a drink. It was only slightly more weird that the drinks had been huge pints of beer. That was feminism for you.
Teri pushed their abandoned glasses to one side, swept the puddles of spilt beverages to the floor with the cardboard beer mat and waited for Jamie.
Eventually, he returned clutching two drinks and two bags of crisps, flush-faced and obviously sweating inside his coat. He clanked the drinks on to the table and tossed the crisps after them. ‘Thought these might keep us going.’
Taking off his coat, he rolled it into a ball and tossed it on the floor as casually as he had tossed the crisps onto the table. Having seen the state of the carpet, Teri didn’t think it was a wise move but said nothing. She sipped gratefully at her drink. It was a gin and tonic, and the shock of the unexpected sourness made her wrinkle her nose—but again she said nothing. She’d wondered why there’d been a slice of lemon floating in a glass of wine.
‘Cheers.’ Jamie held up his drink. Some sort of beer. ‘I just wanted to apologise again for last week.’
‘Were you waiting for me, then—outside work?’ Teri swallowed the gin and tonic again. It really wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. Better than Chardonnay, actually.
Jamie shook his head vigorously and wiped a smear of froth from his top lip. ‘Oh no, of course not.’
Teri’s heart sank quicker than her vain attempts at making soufflés had.
‘Well, when I say no, I mean not exactly,’ he corrected. ‘It was just that I thought I might see you—on the train—and when a few days had gone by and I didn’t, well, I happened to remember where you said you worked and I just thought I’d see if you were around. Sort of.’
‘Oh,’ Teri said. Her throat had gone tight.
They both took a swig of their drinks. ‘Yes, I actually hung around outside your office waiting for you,’ Jamie admitted. ‘Sorry.’
Teri smiled. ‘No, that’s okay. That’s nice.’
‘Well, I just wanted to check the ankle was okay, really.’
Jamie shrugged with a nonchalance that he didn’t really feel. The sort of shrug that says, ‘I won’t lose any sleep over it’, when in fact he had lost lots of sleep. The varying troubles of database management—which were the usual cause of his nocturnal insomnia—had paled into insignificance faced with the turned ankle of a fragile beauty on his conscience. He had been bleary-eyed and bad-tempered every morning after a night spent lying awake thinking about nothing but Teri Carter.
It was ridiculous; he felt like a fifteen-year-old sitting here, suddenly nervous and gawky again. Like a puppy still coming to terms with its oversize paws. She was just as he remembered her, though why he thought she would have changed in a week was uncertain. In fact, he wished she had changed, or that his memory of her had been too vivid and overblown, like a movie shown in Technicolor Cinema-Scope. But no, she was still beautiful. She was still elfin and dainty like one of the Flower Fairies in the book that Francesca was so keen on him reading at least three times every bedtime—when he was home in time.
Teri looked at him above her glass. Her eyes were unnaturally blue and she had eyelashes like Daisy the Cow. He wasn’t absolutely sure that she wasn’t wearing coloured contact lenses. No one had eyes that blue…except possibly Paul Newman. Pamela always commented on Paul Newman’s eyes. That was why she’d started to buy Newman’s Own salad dressing, because of his eyes. Teri’s eyes could sell salad dressing. They could probably sell ice to Eskimos, too.
He was aware that she was speaking. ‘Sorry?’
‘I said it’s fine, thanks.’
‘The drink?’
‘The ankle. You asked about my ankle.’
Good grief, he wished she were ugly, he might be able to pay more attention to what she was saying. Her face kept distracting him. She had a tiny rosebud mouth that pursed and pouted when she talked, and little perfect teeth that showed she wasn’t one to neglect her dental appointments.
‘Clare and I shared a medicinal bottle of brandy and got rather too carried away.’
Perhaps he should suggest putting a paper bag over her head—then he might listen to her rather than just wanting to sit and look at her. Then again, she could take it the wrong way.
‘I had such a bad headache the next day, it made my ankle seem trivial by comparison. They say that the body can only cope with one type of pain at a time, don’t they?’
Jamie snapped his attention back to her. ‘Do they?’
‘I don’t know. Anyway, there’ll be no more sherry trifle in our house for a while.’ She split the packet of roast-beef-flavoured potato crisps open.
‘You put brandy in your sherry trifle?’ he said inanely. ‘Isn’t there a hint there in the title somewhere?’
‘I hate sherry,’ she said.
It was Pamela’s favourite drink, dry sherry—a small one on high days and holidays. That, and gin and tonic.
‘I can’t believe it. I bought you the wrong drink.’ What was he doing? He was here on an illicit…an illicit what? An illicit drinking session with a girl he didn’t know and he glibly bought her his wife’s favourite drink. What a prize prat. ‘You wanted a glass of wine, didn’t you? Grief, you must think I’m an idiot.’
‘I do, but it doesn’t matter.’
‘Let me get you another one.’ He was already on his feet.
‘No, really, it doesn’t matter.’ Teri downed the gin and tonic in one. ‘Oh, to hell with it, why not. Forget the wine, though. I’ll have a Beck’s and I’ll drink it straight out of the bottle.’ She smiled wanly at Jamie’s startled face. ‘Thanks.’
Two hours and several Beck’s later they’d risked the train and were finally jerking past the graffitied walls and out of Euston Station. Conversation had been difficult in the bar, partly due to the decibel level of the animated chatter of stranded commuters, and thanks also to the fruit machines, which bleeped and chimed above it all and then clank-clank-clanked their hoard of treasure out every few minutes. It was also partly due to the fact that he seemed to go into a trance every time she spoke to him. Perhaps he wasn’t just in awe of her beauty—perhaps he was tired. It seemed a safer excuse.
It was difficult to talk now, too. The train was still crowded despite their diversionary delaying tactics of a dalliance in Steamers. Teri was sitting silently next to Jamie, and they exchanged the occasional smile, but neither of them seemed to think it appropriate either to chat or to get their newspapers out. The signals at Watford Junction, it appeared, still couldn’t decide whether they wanted to function or not, so the train inched slowly from station to station while the evening sped rapidly by.
Although the term ‘cry wolf ‘lodged itself firmly in J
amie’s brain, he was feeling quite mellow. As mellow as a newt probably. But who cared? It only took him a moment to come up with the answer: Pamela would care. Pamela would care deeply. If you ate more than three wine-gum sweets in a row, Pamela thought you were on the rocky road to alcoholism. He would have to get a taxi back from the station and risk leaving the car to the tender mercies of the overnight car park. He would be lucky to have any wing mirrors or windows or stereo left by morning or, indeed, a car at all.
As soon as she saw the taxi turning into their drive, she would know he’d been drinking. That, in Pamela’s vocabulary, was drunk. As a skunk. Okay, so he’d had more than the local constabulary would find excusable, but he was still a long way off what most guys would consider a good night out. Still, it was worth it. He’d managed in his quest to bump into Teri again—even though it had meant leaving work early and hanging around the windswept wasteland of Euston Road until she appeared. But what had it achieved? he mused. They had spent a very pleasant couple of hours getting sociably inebriated with the perfectly viable excuse of signal failures at Watford Junction, and now what? The urge to see her again was stronger than ever before, and she hadn’t even got off the train yet! Teri wasn’t just pretty, she was feisty and funny and could probably drink most rugby players under the table without looking even slightly the worse for wear.
Why did she seem to come right into the centre of him and fill a gap that he hadn’t even realised was there? He wasn’t unhappy with Pamela. Okay, they had their moments—sometimes it was like living with the haughty Princess Michael of Kent with the added bonus of premenstrual tension—but on the whole they had a reasonable marriage, certainly no worse than anyone else’s these days.
All right, so he was bored utterly witless by his job; it was only the sheer volume of work and playing political pat-a-cake that gave him sleepless nights—the actual job he could do standing on his head and sometimes felt like doing so just to prove a point. Still, they paid him a barrow-load of cash just for turning up, so it could be considerably worse. He absolutely adored the kids—even when they vomited in the Volvo on long car journeys. They were the best thing that had ever happened to him. That, and winning the club championship at Melrose Golf Club when he was eighteen.
So why was he doing this? Doing what? He wasn’t doing anything! But if he wasn’t doing anything, why did he feel so guilty about not doing it? Why couldn’t he say to Pamela: ‘I was late last week because I clumsily bumped into a woman and sprained her ankle for her in the process, and I’m late tonight because we happened to meet up at the display board’ (slight alteration of the truth admittedly) ‘and I took her for a drink to enquire about the well-being of the aforementioned ankle.’
Simple enough? Simple, but deadly. If there was one thing you had to understand about Pamela it was that she couldn’t cope with glitches in her daily domestic harmony, and her husband taking a strange woman, however injured, for a drink would definitely be considered a glitch.
He could just see it now—it would mean tears, tantrums, a temporary but inconvenient banishment to the spare room and an upgrading in the vile atrocities of Alphabite combat. So signal failures it was and signal failures it would remain, and he would avoid the endearing charms of Teri Carter—named Therese after a genteel and elderly maiden aunt, he discovered, but reappraised to Teri on account of the amount of time she spent shinning up trees and playing football as a wee schoolgirl rather than doing cross-stitch—as if it was a deadly plague.
‘We’re coming into Leighton Buzzard.’ Teri stood up and smoothed her skirt, which didn’t really need smoothing. He was aware that a few newspapers in the vicinity dipped noticeably.
‘It’s been great,’ Jamie said lightly. She had picked up a thread of cotton on the arm of her jacket from the back of the train seat, which was split at the seam and oozing stuffing. He longed to reach out and take it from her, grooming her so that she looked perfect again. This was ridiculous. He locked his fingers together, just in case they had the urge to disobey his brain. ‘Perhaps we’ll bump into each other again.’
‘I’d like that.’
The train stopped at the platform, and the man in front of Teri jumped out. She hesitated, only slightly, but Jamie knew a hesitation when he saw one. Why couldn’t she still have a sprained ankle, one that would keep her limping for months—then he could gallantly sweep her off the train and have a watertight excuse for escorting her home? He wanted to go with her to her little seventies box on the hideous sprawling housing estate and close the door behind them forever.
‘What time train do you catch in the morning?’ she asked. ‘The 6.25,’ he answered, his heart pounding like a Bon Jovi bass line in his chest.’ It stops at Leighton Buzzard too.’
She smiled.’ Perhaps I’ll see you then.’
The door slammed behind her, and he watched her picked out in the darkness by the platform lights as she ran nimbly up the stairs of the red metal footbridge. That was how it started. As simple as that.
Chapter 5
‘Can’t you come up with something more original than that?’ Pamela clanged the spoon on the plate as she dished out some Alphabetti Spaghetti. ‘Do the signals ever work at Watford Junction?’
‘It would appear not,’ Jamie said resignedly. ‘Look, I’ve had a very long day and I don’t want to argue with you.’ Very had been pronounced in his native tongue—verra. With r’s as rolling as the countryside. His accent always got stronger when he was cross—and he knew it annoyed Pamela. ‘Would it make you happier if I told you it was vampire bats hanging from the overhead wires that had caused the delay?’ And when Pamela snorted, he said, ‘I thought not.’
‘British Rail have a much larger catalogue of excuses than the pathetic ones you resort to.’ She banged the grill-pan into the dishwasher. ‘Whatever happened to the wrong-type-of-snow or the feeble leaves-on-the-line routine?’
‘Those are seasonal phenomena which can only be used for a paltry few weeks. The rest of the time they have to use more vague, catch-all excuses. There’d be no point in saying the wrong type of snow was causing delays when there’d been no snow at all.’ Jamie rested his head in his hands. ‘Commuters might be a pretty stupid bunch, but even we’d spot that one a mile off.’
Pamela tutted. It was an unconvinced tut, and she banged the drawer shut to underline it. He looked at his wife from between the hammock his hands made under his chin. She was tall, cool and classy, with great hair. It was long, straight and reddy-blonde like a lion’s mane, although she had recently taken to having it surgically enhanced with highlights—unlike his own hair, which was seeing the beginnings of genetically programmed highlights. Her eyes were the colour of chocolate buttons, and she sort of blended in with autumn. The word which most suited her was aloof, definitely aloof—and perfect—and socially aware. Pamela was as different from Teri as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter is from, well, butter.
‘You take no interest in the children.’ She obviously had no intention of letting this drop.
‘I take lots of interest in the children. It’s just that it can’t often be on a week night at the moment. They won’t always be in bed by seven o’clock.’
‘That’s still not much use if you can’t get home before nine o’clock.’ The plate of Alphabetti Spaghetti and two burnt sausages was crashed down on the table in front of him. ‘They you get to see them on a Wednesday.’
Still surveying her, he could see that Pamela was pale and her face looked strained. She must be tired, because she had failed to spell anything vitriolic with the Alphabetti Spaghetti. That could also be because it was much more slippery to deal with than Alphabites. Creative caustic comments with uncooperative carbohydrates required a certain level of concentration—he knew this because he had tried it once to see how long it must take her. Admittedly a novice at tinned-pasta abuse, he had spent ten minutes trying to find the right letters to spell bloody cow before he gave up. By which time the bright orange-coloured tomato
sauce had gone cold. There was definitely an art to it.
‘You don’t see them at the weekends either,’ she went on tersely. ‘You’re always out on that damned golf course!’
Jamie put down the knife and fork he had just picked up. ‘It’s my only form of relaxation—and exercise, come to that. And it’s certainly the only exercise MacTavish gets.’ The dog slinked guiltily out of the kitchen before he was incriminated further.
Jamie picked up his knife and fork again. ‘And despite getting up at five-thirty every morning to go to work, on Saturday I still get up at just after six so that I can play a few holes and be back here by lunchtime to see what word of the day is. Then we have all afternoon to do family things.’
‘But we don’t, do we? You usually fall asleep in front of the television in the afternoon while purporting to watch motor racing.’
‘That’s only if you haven’t got anything specific planned—and besides, I’m so exhausted at the weekends I can only just manage to sit upright after three o’clock.’ He stuck his fork into a sausage and belligerently bit the end off it.
Pamela winced but didn’t comment. Obviously, his eating habits would wait until another time.
‘I take them to the playground at Willen Lake.’ He munched. ‘Occasionally.’
Pamela refused to be easily placated. ‘It’s not fair, Jamie. It’s not fair on me, and it’s not fair on the kids.’
‘Look on the bright side—it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be big enough to play golf with me.’
Pamela’s face darkened ominously.
‘It was meant to be funny,’ he said, putting down his sausage. ‘It was a joke. Remember jokes? They come in Christmas crackers along with paper hats that don’t fit and rubbishy bits of plastic that are broken by Boxing Day.’
‘I don’t think it’s funny at all.’
‘I don’t think it’s funny either. And if we’re going to discuss not being fair— I hardly think you’re being fair.’ He pushed the plate away from him and massaged his temples. ‘I work five long days each week in a mind-numbing job. I don’t need this when I come home. I don’t get in at this hour every night out of choice.’
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